10 May 2015

This week, Barbara Partee will be giving a series of lectures at the UConn Lecture Series entitled "The History of Formal Semantics.” There will be an interlude by Vladimir Borschev and Barbara Partee on the integration of formal and lexical semantics.

Lecture 1: Logic and language: A history of ideas and controversies

Lecture 2: The starring role of quantification in the history of formal semantics

Lecture 3 (Borschev and Partee): Ontology and the integration of formal and lexical semantics

Lecture 4: Psychologism and Anti-psychologism in the history of formal semantics

Graduating linguistic major Christopher Baron has been awarded the highly prestigious Baggett Fellowship at the University of Maryland. Baggett Fellowships are full-time post baccalaureate research positions and many illustrious linguists have started their careers as Baggett Fellows. For more about the Baggett programs, go here, and for past fellows, research assistants and summer scholars, go here.

Barbara will be part of a mini-summer school event on pronouns in Moscow June 16-19. She'll be one of three invited lecturers, along with Colin Phillips and Eric Reuland, giving four lectures each on various aspects of anaphora. There will also be a mini-conference with submitted papers. The event is hosted by the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Barbara will, probably predictably, lecture about the history of theories of anaphora. For more information, go here.

I have been invited to participate in an unusual sort of workshop outside of Moscow, July 6-11. It's a "philosophy paper development workshop" in which four Western professors will be together with 8-10 young Russian and Ukrainian philosophers who have written papers in English for which they would like some mentoring help with getting them into shape to publish in a Western journal. Everyone will be staying in a pension near the Moscow River, with intensive sessions at which the young participants present their work and the faculty and fellow participants all help critique it. For purposes of this workshop, our own Ekaterina Vostrikova and Petr Kusliy are presenting themselves as young philosophers of language (that's also true!) and have applied, and I think it is very likely that they will be accepted. So this is going to be fun!

Brian Dillon gave a talk last Friday, May 8, at Stony Brook University’s linguistics colloquium. His talk was entitled “Which Noun Phrases is the verb supposed to agree with…and when?” You can learn more here.